- Patch Notes 0.2.0 - 26 February 2023
We have been working hard to formally add controller support and Steam Deck support for Bowmen. This game update includes many major changes to the game and UI that adds controller and Steam Deck support, however, there are still a few game bugs and kinks that need to be ironed out over the next few weeks. If you run into issues with this build, please let us know on the official Bowmen forums or here on Steam. Bugs will continue to be removed through minor patches as we find them. Once we feel we have ironed out all the bugs on the Deck, we will have the game reviewed by Valve so it can be Deck verified and provide another update. Until then, note that you may run into issues while playing on a Steam Deck. What's New?: Release Candidate (RC) 0.2.0 from 0.1.6.5 Major Game/Gameplay Changes Game versions have been simplified to indicate that the game is still in early access, starting wit…
- Patch 0.1.6.5 - 7 October 2022
We have been working hard to formally add controller support and Steam Deck support for Bowmen. This game update includes many major changes to the game and UI that adds controller and Steam Deck support, however, there are still a few game bugs and kinks that need to be ironed out over the next few weeks. If you run into issues with this build, please let us know on the official Bowmen forums or here on Steam. Bugs will continue to be removed through minor patches as we find them. Once we feel we have ironed out all the bugs on the Deck, we will have the game reviewed by Valve so it can be Deck verified and provide another update. Until then, note that you may run into issues while playing on a Steam Deck. What's New?: Release Candidate (RC) v0.1.6.5 from v0.1.6.4 Major Game/Gameplay Changes Controller support has been added to the game! In the coming months we will be testing various…
- Bowmen Steam Deck / Controller Support - 30 August 2022
Since the earliest days of Bowmen's development and consistently throughout its existence, I've largely gotten two major pieces of feedback from players: 1. The game would probably succeed best on a mobile device platform (such as iOS). 2. The game would greatly benefit from full controller support, in addition to support for a mouse and keyboard. The second piece of advice I also received from Valve, since a large portion of PC gamers also own a controller and use it regularly for playing games. However, initially I wanted to stick to a mouse and keyboard for a few reasons: First, the original game concept design was to be that of old school PC games like the ones I played back in the day, such as Gunbound, Warcraft, and Diablo. For a lot of these games, they had a chat feature upon the initial game menu that allowed you to talk with other players that were currently in game, which I g…
- Patch v0.1.6.4 - 28 March 2022
What's New?: Release Candidate (RC) v0.1.6.4 from v0.1.5.4 Major Game/Gameplay Changes The Unity Engine has been updated and the game library rebuilt. As a whole, this has led to a huge increase in game performance. We also made several changes to game art assets, which should further improve game performance and reduce hard disk size. The character creation screen has been removed from the game. This was for the most part a relic from when the game did not use Steam IDs or Steamworks. New characters will automatically be assigned your Steam ID as their name, and you will only be prompted to view and accept the EULA via the Steam client in the future. In the options menu, a checkbox has been added for voices, rather than it being mixed with the SFX slider. In game voices will now be togglable. The player level cap has been raised from 40 to 50. Ranged enemy health and projectile damage…
- Development Updates: October - 2 October 2021
Hello everyone, Brokenshield here. We've been hard at work on Bowmen this summer/fall, but most of that work has been largely invisible. We had noticed at the start of the summer the game's cheat detection system was lacking in a lot of areas, and so we decided to overhaul that system and implement a new one. With the most recent update this October, this system is now live. The game will scan itself for changes and attempts at hacking / manipulating the leaderboards, and will send a report to us (as well as close the game) if there is any detection of cheating (note: the game does not monitor the rest of your system, nor does it collect any data whatsoever about anything outside of the game itself). We implemented this to hopefully maintain the integrity of the leaderboards, and keep your hard earned scores where they should be: at the top! If you notice any issues with the latest vers…
- Patch v0.1.5.4 - 2 October 2021
What's New?: Release Candidate (RC) v0.1.5.4 from v0.1.5.3 Major Game/Gameplay Changes We've added a more extensive cheat detection system to prevent hacking and leaderboard manipulation. A text warning and error sound effect will now trigger if you attempt to use the Melee Slash ability, but do not have enough strength or mana to do so. The level cap has been reduced to 40 (down from 60).
- Patch v0.1.5.3 - 7 May 2021
What's New?: Release Candidate (RC) v0.1.5.3 from v0.1.5.0 Major Game/Gameplay Changes The window for which the Melee Slash ability can hit targets has been tightened. This was to avoid some enemies appearing to get hit by the slash after the animation has finished. The window for which the summoned Sword of Justice can hurt enemies has been tightened. This was to avoid some enemies appearing to get hit by the sword after it despawned. A "death animation" sequence has been added, where the camera will rotate around the player during death before fading to the summary screen. The usable item Akash now drops more frequently than other items. Some audio has been reworked to be more clear. Early waves will no longer drop epic/legendary quality items. These will drop later on during the encounter to match the wave difficulty. The damage from bombs and the summonable Wizard's "Genesis" attack…
- Patch v0.1.0.5 - 17 April 2021
What's New?: Release Candidate (RC) v0.1.0.5 from v0.1.0.4 Major Game/Gameplay Changes Steam saves are now being sorted by Steam user, rather than by computer. This allows for multiple Steam users to play Bowmen on the same machine, while keeping their game data separately stored. If this update causes issues with your game data, download it from the Steam cloud when prompted upon startup. We will also be offering support on the Steam forums to help recover your game data if you have issues with this update. The level cap has been reduced to 60 (down from 100). A Melee Slash ability has been added to the game, that allows you to finish off enemies quickly in front of you with a cone slash attack. The ability is unlocked after investing 8 stat points into Strength. Enemy health, movement speed, and damage (with the exception of bosses) have been increased across all difficulties. The hea…
- Bowmen Release Date Update! - 11 April 2021
Greetings fellow archers! We've been hard at work over here at Ethereal Gem trying to make Bowmen the best possible game it can be before we launch it, officially, to the rest of the world. Your feedback during the Early Access period is paramount to Bowmen's success, and we are very grateful to the few of you who have already provided us with some feedback, you know who you are. You make working on the game fresh and fun, and we get very excited when we implement a suggested change and send it out back to you for play testing. As you may know, the targeted release date that we had set for ourselves (May 3rd) was fast approaching. Based on the state of the game, feedback we've received, and some ideas we still wished to implement, we decided that it was best to keep the game in Early Access for a little while longer. For example, we noticed during our own internal play testing sessions…
- Patch v0.1.0.4 - 24 January 2021
What's New?: Release Candidate (RC) v0.1.0.4 from v0.1.0.3 Major Game/Gameplay Changes The level cap has been raised from 30 to 100. The damage of enemy projectiles has been increased across all difficulties. Some variability has been added to enemy accuracy, which means that they will miss more often than they did in previous builds. The movement speed of the skeleton knights has been increased dramatically and is difficulty dependent. These enemies were initially intended to be a fast and immediate threat to the player, requiring swift action to avoid death. Their slow movement speed wasn't cutting it, and so we increased it. The "kill counter" time window, that is, the time window for which enemies can be killed and contribute to a double kill, multikill, etc. has been increased. This was because some enemies could be killed relatively close to one another and it wouldn't register wi…
- Bowmen Early Access is here! - 7 January 2021
Greetings fellow archers! The time has come to execute order 66... no wait, that's... that's not right hold on... *(Ruffles through papers)* Ah-HA! Here it is! *(Ahem)* It is time to release Bowmen online through Steam Early Access! After many years of development, it is finally out and ready for the world at large to play it! As per our previous announcement, we had decided to delay the final launch of the game to March to allow for us to make a few more tweaks before publishing the game and pushing it to Steam. However, as we began to do this, we realized that there are a few features of Bowmen that likely cannot be tweaked through internal play testing alone. Some players may have invaluable feedback to give us that, had we left ourselves to our own devices, we would never know about. Perhaps some items are under-powered, perhaps some others are over-powered, or perhaps the game simp…
- Patch v0.1.0.3 (Release Candidate) - 3 January 2021
What's New?: Release Candidate (RC) v0.1.0.3 from v0.1.0.2 Major Game/Gameplay Changes The way the game handles loading new scenes has been modified so that transitions should be smoother. This includes "minor" loading screens between menus. How Lord Pain spawns has been modified to ensure he does not spawn around an Infernal Balrog. The Forgotten skin now unlocks by achieving the Hunter rank or better during the Season of the Phoenix. The Ghost skin now unlocks by equipping every item in the game at least once. Some minions will no longer spawn if Lord Pain is active (i.e., aerial enemies and ranged enemies). This makes it a bit easier to kill enemies during the final boss fight because Lord Pain has such a large hitbox. Achievement Changes The achievement Two Thousand has been added, which is awarded for reaching a score of 2,000 or better on inferno difficulty. The achievement Five T…
- Release Date Update - 26 December 2020
Hello fellow archers! Some of you may have noticed that we pushed back the release date of Bowmen from its original release date of December 31st, 2020 to March 1st, 2021. I would like to take a brief moment to explain the reasoning behind that decision, the current state of the game, and where we plan to go from here. First and foremost, the development of Bowmen has been an incredibly awesome and rewarding journey for myself (the lead developer), and a handful of other individuals who have helped work on Bowmen. It is a relatively small indie game with an even smaller development team, but it has been one of the most rewarding and challenging journeys of my life, and it is awesome to see the project begin to come together as we approach the final release. Due to my other obligations as a scientist, and being almost exclusively the only person working on the game, development and bug f…
- Patch v0.1.0.2 (Release Candidate) - 23 September 2020
What's New?: Release Candidate (RC) v0.1.0.2 from Beta v0.0.135 Major Game/Gameplay Changes Season one ("Phoenix") has officially started, moving forward from the Beta. This effectively resets any ranks earned through the Beta and paves the way for the first season available during Early Access and the game's launch. Resetting your game data will now only reset your player's stats, but not affect leaderboard scores or Steam Achievements. We've transitioned game data saves away from a registry based system (which is native to the Unity engine) to a file based system. This is to allow for steam cloud saves and synchronization across computers. Users now have the ability to join and leave the global chat channel using commands (type /help into the chat channel to see the commands, or go to the support forum). Also, chat moderation tools have been added to GM accounts, allowing GMs to ban,…
- Patch v0.0.0.135 (Beta) - 21 July 2020
What's New?: Beta v0.0.0.135 from Beta v0.0.0.134 Major Game/Gameplay Changes "+X EXP" text now pops up after an enemy is killed, letting you know how much EXP has been earned for each enemy. Enemies now spawn in "waves", rather than spawning as a constant stream. This allows the player to recuperate if they dealt with a wave efficiently. Over time, more enemies spawn per wave, increasing the difficulty. In response to the addition of "waves", item mechanics have changed slightly (for example, Mjolnir deals less damage), and bombs spawn less frequently. Item text has been modified to indicate item quality, based on how powerful the item is at damaging enemies. Items with higher quality will drop later in the encounter, while during the first few waves of enemies items with lower power will drop. Items with the new "Legendary" quality will only drop off bosses (Balrog), off enemies with…
- Patch v0.0.0.134 (Beta) - 18 May 2020
What's New?: Beta v0.0.0.134 from Beta v0.0.0.133 Major Game/Gameplay Changes The player may now increase their stat points on the "Hero Information" screen. The game will no longer pause automatically at the start of an onslaught for stat point distribution purposes. However, you can still pause with the "K" key during an onslaught to enter stat points. The game now has three different background audio tracks that it cycles through during Onslaught. A brief tutorial has been added to the game, which instructs the player how to play the first time they start an onslaught. Playtesters can no longer level up using the "0" key during Onslaught. We've changed how the game handles connecting to our online servers and we've added in error messages. The game is now playable offline, however, your rank and scores will not be updated during offline play. Completed some GUI updates (such as the "…
- Patch v0.0.0.133 (Beta) - 30 April 2020
What's New?: Beta v0.0.0.133 from Beta v0.0.0.130 Major Game/Gameplay Changes Arrows no longer scale damage with flight time. Instead, arrows that reach a certain y height will have their damage increased by either 300% or 400%, depending upon how high they go. The "Training Sword" item has been updated accordingly. Enemies have had their movement speed significantly slowed, spawn rates dropped, and their health boosted to accommodate for the arrow damage changes. Bomb and item damage have been modified to accommodate for the enemy health increases. The items Vol, Sword of Justice, Stonehammer, and Captain's Mace have been modified. Instead of dropping the Sword, Spirit Golem, or Ghost Ship, respectively, in a given location, the player can now select where the objects will spawn and deal damage to enemies. The "Balrog Slayer" achievement has been modified. It now will unlock after you…
